Hanif Kureishi: Gabriel's Gift

‘We haven’t got any money!’ she said.

‘We’ll have to earn some.’

‘What a good idea. When are you going to start work?’ She looked at him properly. ‘In lots of ways you’re still a little kid but actually you’re big enough. But I wouldn’t want you to put up with what I’ve been through.’

The rumble and whirr of his mother’s sewing machine had been the soundtrack to Gabriel’s childhood. She had started off, in a more glamorous time, by making party clothes for her young, fab friends in the music business, and then for the bands, their managers and groupies. Mum had done it as a favour and because she liked to please. Had she been a designer like her heroine Vivienne Westwood, she might have progressed.

As it was, for the last few years she had supported herself, Gabriel and Rex by working in a cramped room in the house, making tour jackets for groups, roadies and their helpers. Sometimes she had to work all night for weeks to have them ready, doing everything herself, with only opera on the radio for company.

A few years ago, when the country decided it should become entrepreneurial and began dizzily to bolt about like someone who’d just awoken from an overlong sleep, she had tried to expand the business by renting a small warehouse and employing the unemployed. But the work had been irregular and she had got into debt. Now, working alone again, the job was lonely. She was looking for something else; somehow her whole life had become a ‘looking for something else’.

Gabriel considered the ideas his parents used to enjoy discussing over supper. One of them was for a shop that sold only blue objects. Another was for a shop that sold pyjamas.

‘It isn’t difficult to see why we haven’t been able to afford a new carpet for years,’ Mum had said.

A better idea was for a shop where you could pop in to have your dreams interpreted and be told your future. Mum had said this wasn’t entirely vapid: if you saw the present or the past in a dream, you could predict the future, since for most people the present was merely the past with a later date. Gabriel wasn’t sure how lucrative this would be, even if dreams, like pyjamas, were something that everyone had to have.

‘At night even the most conservative of us becomes an avant gardist,’ his mother had said.

Gabriel had been very interested in this. ‘I want to be an avant gardist all the time.’ he said.

‘That’s why they have schools,’ said his father. ‘To stamp out that kind of thing.’

His parents had argued a lot, saying the same things repeatedly, louder each time. He remembered his father placing objects in inconvenient positions on the floor, in the hope that Mum would fall over and break her neck.

It was clear that she, in her turn, wanted Rex to wake up one day as a different sort of person, the type who earned money, didn’t mind cleaning, sometimes kissed her, and was less melancholic than her. A tall order, obviously.

Gabriel had never seen his mother more agitated than on the day his father left. She had gone into her room and shut the door. What could Gabriel do but sit outside trying to draw, waiting for her? It reminded him of standing on a chair at the window as a child, awaiting Mum’s return from the shops.

‘When I’m gone, you won’t know what to do without me,’ Dad used to say.

‘When you’re gone, Rex, we’ll know exactly what to do. Our souls will soar. You’re the ballast in our balloon, mate. We’ll be better off in every way,’ his mother replied.

Would they be?

He thought he heard his mother opening the window. Drawers were pulled out; the wardrobe door banged. For too long, there was silence. He wanted to call someone. But who? The police? A neighbour? Mum might stay in bed for days, perhaps for weeks. If she wasn’t arguing with Father, what would she do?

He had noticed, in his friends ‘parents too, that there were different styles of madness for men and women, fathers and mothers. The women became obsessive, excessively nervous, afraid and self-hating, fluttering and blinking with damaged inner electricity. The men blunted themselves with alcohol and cursed, blamed and hit out, disappearing into the pub and then into jail.

When it came to suffering, Gabriel’s mother was, at least here, something of an artist, with a range of both broad and subtle manoeuvres. She could enter an airless tunnel of silence that would wither Rex and Gabriel until they felt like dried sticks; or she could put together words and noises of a force that could fling them against a wall and leave them shaking for days. Whichever method she selected was guaranteed to ensure that her ‘common-law’ husband and son felt it was them — bad guilty men, both — who had strangled and stifled her.

Waiting for her, the words ‘broken’ and ‘home’ had come to mind. ‘He’s from a broken home,’ he recalled people saying of other children, with knowing pity. He pictured a drawing ripped in two, and a doll’s house with an axe through it. He thought of how it felt to miss people and the relief of their return. With his father, though, it seemed to be an absence without end. Gabriel had never been angrier. It wasn’t even as though he had been consulted. But what family was ever a democracy from the kids’ point of view?

At last he had looked up. He would know what the future would be like.

The door had opened. His mother was wearing her darkest, most menacing clothes and make-up; her hair was scraped back.

‘Get our coats.’

‘Are you going to get a new boyfriend?’

‘I’ll find a job first. It’s time we got moving.’ As he hurried for their coats, she said, ‘I think you quite like all this exciting action.’

‘So do you,’ he said.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Now — into the future!’

That evening and the next morning she and Gabriel had gone to offices, shops and restaurants, asking, wheedling and arguing.

‘Not you, I don’t want to see you, but the boss!’ Mum had said to the unfortunate person deputed to dismiss her.

This technique had been successful.

His mother had started work the following Monday, as a waitress in a fashionable new bar replete with armchairs, lamps and big windows, where young people could do what they enjoyed most: study themselves and one another in numerous mirrors. Like all the bars now, it was bathed in coloured light, blue or red or pink.

‘They asked me whether I’d had any experience,’ she had told him. ‘Experience, I said! I’m a mother and wife. I’m used to waiting on ungrateful, detestable people.’

He had been to the bar but didn’t like the way young people in polo-necks, puffa-jackets and leather trousers snapped their fingers at her and shouted ‘Excuse me!’ or ‘Waitress!’ as she flew over the floor with tiers of dishes attached to her, looking as though she were trying to carry an open Venetian blind. Now Gabriel crossed the road when he came to the place. At work, she was like a woman he used to know.

The new bar was an indication of either futile hope or a new direction. The city was no longer home to immigrants only from the former colonies, plus a few others: every race was present, living side by side without, most of the time, killing one another. It held together, this new international city called London — just about — without being unnecessarily anarchic or corrupt. There was, however, little chance of being understood in any shop. Dad once said, ‘The last time I visited the barber’s I came out with a bowl of couscous, half a gram of Charlie and a number two crop. I only went in for a shave!’

Their neighbourhood was changing. Only that morning a man had been walking down the road with a mouldy mattress on his head, which you knew he was going to sleep on; other men shoved supermarket trolleys up the street, looking for discarded junk to sell; and there were still those whose idea of dressing up was to shave or put their teeth in.